


v. (without indication)

by elebuu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: AU, EXHALES, F/M, Music, ambiguous 4.x Bad End au, and you cannot tell me this wouldn't extend to musical performance, cursed music energy, musician wol, piano playing, solus is a theatrical bastard, sry if this is a mess but, the draft for this was called 'cursed music energy but they don't fuck', the piece i had on loop while i finished this is 'Rachmaniana', this is the longest thing i've written in months and i refuse to be ashamed of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 23:50:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18537994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu
Summary: She is radiant.When the dust of war settles over defeat, and the theatres are rebuilt, music replaces her loss for words.And he, the wicked, will see her backstage.





	v. (without indication)

That was the performance that sealed his fate.

She played like a shade of a woman, her untrembling fingers bent and spiderlike as they variously twisted and crashed, laved and lovered upon the vertebrae of her instrument.

No one could tell him who she was. Not because they _would_ not—they, really and truly, could not. Though she haunted their concert halls with her cries, extracted from wood and lacquer and ivory with flaying intimacy, the dominating spirit embodied on their stages, like a phantom’s due she would be gone as soon as the overhead lighting died and consigned her to sweating darkness.

She sold every seat in their houses with just a rumour—and no one, not even the folk who hired her for a haunting, could tell him more than her name or perhaps her mannerisms or whatever she was clad in the night of her concert.

In this peeled and naked new world, no one within an hundred malms of earshot knew who she was.

Thus could Solus only smile.

He _did_.

~~

“Distinguished ser—might you be looking for one of our programmes, or to reserve a se—”

Solus turned slowly with an ambiguous smile, leaving the concierge silently off-guard. “As a matter of fact,” he began in his most cultured, cultivated tone, “I would have you inform me who the performer is tonight.”

He handed the attendant a perfectly-pressed leaflet, folded as if it had never been touched by human hands. A listing he had slipped from the community board downtown; a longstanding tradition in this region, to leave notices--news, pleas, requests; irresponsible rumours and slogans, graffiti, and bounties--all pinned carefully to the most public mural wall. It was a strange town for a performance venue, to be sure—but how could he complain? If this mystery woman could rattle the walls with her playing even in a hive of foundling-vagabond careers, what other wistful miracles might she wring?

At one time, more than any single soul ought be able.

“…Pray forgive my ignorance on this matter, ser. I must speak with the stage manager, but if I might beseech of you a few moments’ time to confirm—”

“Then she _is_ playing, here, tonight?”

The attendant shrugged off a shiver with admirable reparation. “Ah—I shall have her name for you in mere—”

“No, no, you have been splendid help this day, I thank you. I have left my seating preferences on the reverse of the parchment.”

With that, he affected a tilt of his forehead that swung his whiter waves in front of his eyes, and a bow from the waist.

 _Oh_ , the agony he longed to hear bleeding from her keystrokes tonight. His robes swirled round the shins of his boots as the arid breeze picked up, a wind that covered the rough and desiccated sound of his satisfied chuckling.

~

Magic, from the first strike.

Magic, until the last.

On the knell of the last echo of the last note, she unwound at the spine like a dove struck through by arrow, folding over on her straining limbs. Positively _holy_.

He was not even certain whether the mist that rolled over the falling curtains was only in his imagination.

Predictably—and at least in this he could forgive mortal predictability—those in attendance not still stunned by the ringing that travelled up the walls erupted into ovations. Solus was certain she had already withdrawn. There would be no offense in his failure to applaud at this sublime moment, as he slipped from space like the shadow he was and made to follow her.

~

From this briefest distance, the battle scars of her playing stood out radiant and sore on her fingers. She hadn't failed to catch the attentions of a few patrons in the wings, apparently--at that, Solus frowned. _Inconvenient_. Nor was the soloist herself so eager, taking furtive bows and averting her eyes. It was then he saw an opportunity.

 _Enter from stage left,_ he thought, an almost silent rumble of laughter rolling down his coat.

"Really, splendid--it would not be a contract proper, merely a season here at the villa, and then--"

"But surely, you've plans after touring, yes? I'm certain there will be--"

"I _said_ , my deepest thanks--but I decline." Ah. The fire had never quite got stomped all the way out, had it, Solus wondered. It's in her voice still; and still would it burn the fool who stood too close to her temper. There was coldness, now, too, however...

And the dithering yet persisted. Curiosity put the smallest citric smile on his lips, and he made himself known then.

A fleeting look of real frustration incensed her features at the sight of him approaching, overwritten quickly by practiced stoicism when he began to intervene.

"Perhaps," Solus started, coy enough to be threatening, "Your attempts at patronage would be better spent on the provision of some _silent recitation_ time. One cannot expect divinity at one's beck and call, after all. Even the makers of miracles must have time to rest... replenish their talents--without the interference of most _impassioned_ collectors."

The gentlemen in question startled at the shoulders, and, muttering quickly-humbled goodbyes, adjusted their respective wardrobes for the brisk outdoors. Solus tracked their retreat with careful, and _very_ pleased yellow eyes, the wry smile fading into satiety as they disappeared from sight.

He stood with his arms folded in a cross behind his back, his gloves interlocking at his waist, and met the woman's scrutinising gaze with a collected masque of his own.

"I suppose you're ready to make your plea now?", she asked him dully. It almost wasn't a question. Solus merely affected as genial an expression as his wild, haughty features would allow, the smile creasing the corners of his eyes, inadvertently casting a gloom over the brightness of his irises.

"I have none to make. Though I do beg forgiveness for delaying your departure, to be sure."

He took a light bow, raising a white-gloved hand to his chest to insist on the words.

Like unchipped granite she stood. Assuming nothing, betraying nothing of herself; perhaps, even believing in nothing. Her stabs and slashes, the cleaves of her _forte_ s, were her bridge to the prying eyes of the world who would know what lay inside.

He suppressed a rueful laugh. She had absolutely no recollection of who he was.

It was _perfection._

"No, I think that aught I ask of your time is to impart my... gratitude, for a truly surreal experience." Straightening, he withdrew from beneath the sash that acted as the lapel over his breast a lone blossom, fresh on stem. How he kept it from being crushed, he only hoped she would think to wonder later.

"A performance has such mortality in its nature," he mused out loud. "Unless by some device the sound is captured, an imperfect replica, the second that the hall returns to silent equilibrium, an experience has died that shall be forever irretrievable. So too, the life a soul lives." With a slight incline of his head, dipped as he tilted the token toward her, he brought his offering into the light.

A single rose, its petals the same blood-black of the hair that fell into his face as he leaned. A deep and rotten red of timeless darkness, played out on fragrant petals. He had had it shorn of its fangs, of course.

Aught that would maim her blessed hands that was not the body of her instrument, he felt deserved crushed beneath his boot. And he would sooner not grind something so lovely under the brass cleats of his soles again.

She accepted it by the neck of stem below its sepals, a tormentous proximity to his own fingers, with the posture of a violinist. It occurred to him just then that he might be mistaken; though he knew of her bone-rattling command of the keys, he never thought to investigate what she might do with the raw, howling strings. The thought was nearly unbearable, and over it he threw a cloak of agnosia.

He stood back as she examined the bloom with the frown of one struggling against a damaged memory. Fear flickered so briefly over her eyes that he felt thrilled to suspect the gesture had unlocked something.

Was she holding her breath?

It would be such poetic injustice if she was.

“...Thank you. This is kind,” she said at last, softly. An understated acquiescence, but one that would, he thought, have shaken a mortal man to his core. It was not unlike how he imagined being thanked by the deiform statuary of some old spirit’s burial grounds. “You… waited around and chased off those… creeping men just for this?”

Oh, to hear bitter skepticism puncture quiet joy.

“I have no favours to ask of you save one.” She looked guarded; a fair posture. “Never, I implore you--never allow that abyssal flame to lapse. And should you find your practice rooms similarly… _populated_ , I know of halls where you may be undisturbed.”

Solus suppressed an uproarious laugh at the way she blatantly rolled her eyes at him.

“How generous of you.”

Solus quirked an eyebrow, an affectation he was well aware placed no small effect on his interlocutors. He could hardly help it, he bemoaned to himself, facetiously. That was simply how they populated the ridge enclosing the cavern of bone where his eyes dwelt.

Something difficult even for him to read evolved upon her face. Was it a memory after all--was the game up, so to speak, and would he lose another piece of corporeality to the comedy of his flattery?

With a sigh that better resembled a long exhale after hours underwater, she lowered the gift to her side and moved to ask--

He lifted a hand in dismissal. “‘Tisn’t a request. I wish only to offer sanctuary to one of _unusual_ plenitude of voice… most particularly in whose travels she is scarce alone with her art. A patron, yes, that would be an honour above honours,” he professed, allowing as little drawl into his tone as he could manage for the perfection of his mood. “But first and foremost and for all time, I would--”

“I accept.”

For all the recent decades he had played his part among the ordinary human cast of this star, he still for longer than he was proud to acknowledge found himself taken aback. This was becoming _dreadful._ Wonderful… and dreadful. He replaced his arms at his back, not quite willing to keep the flash of wonder from widening his eerie eyes.

“The address is here, on the florist’s slip, yes?” She was delightfully unreadable.

“Just so. It is a well-known residence, but scarcely visited. I…” He paused, the motion of rumination swinging his single earring with a glint of soft metal noise. “I confess I had no expectation that you would agree. Consider it the privilege of many lifetimes, O wonder.”

“You had best be honest about your practice facilities.” Right to the gut. It would not have taken a man of intellect to deduce that her first instruments were drawn on the battlefield, but then, who could think of anything else at all when she began to play? She left certain questions unasked and unanswered. She thralled her would-be askers with this craft ere they took their first inquisitory breaths.

“You have my word,” he swore quietly, realising only belatedly that awe had cut him hoarse.

~~

  ~

~~

__________________________________________________________________________ //:||

this was the address.

tucked behind an edifice of weathered stone, chewed upon by rebellious life, half-eaten by heavy gardens, it stood. she had long since dispensed with whether or not this was the right place; if she was going the right way. all roads led to… ...where?

it wasn’t important.

her heels ached from walking in street-scuffed boots, but the worst pain was, as ever, buried under her ribs; and between those maladies lay the pain to which she now paid most attention. her fingers. her palms.

every concert, it was worse; they were like phantom limbs, or else like the grip of one who has dropped a priceless object, and fumbles in darkness to retrieve it. pawing through her invisible exoskeleton, numbly reaching for a--what was it? an implement? an instrument?

… a weapon?

but lingering on that question was like lingering on any of the others that skittered in front of the hollows of her eyes, double-crossing the bridge of her nose. and yet, and yet, and yet.

the pads of her fingers where they made contact with keys, or with strings--touching anything that made either beautiful or wretched sounds--those synapses did something better than soothe.

“the right place” was wherever she could go to play.

she crossed the moss-consumed threshold through the open gate. another visitor might have thought this place abandoned. she wondered if he even really lived here.

and, for that matter. she lifted the rose from a sling made of her few personal effects. though she had walked through the dry and stone-specked terrain for most of the day, the dew-fattened black petals of the thing had yet to wilt. they hardly creased, even with the abuse of being stuffed into her clothing as she marched, sentient only in her feet as they trod the stone. what an unnatural thing. rather like its eccentric donor; a man who seemed to be made of stage curtains and opera smoke, the lids and caverns of his eyes cadaverously dark around the piercing brightness within them.

she turned the bloom over in her hand. no thorns. her mysterious admirer seemed cautious of her hands. no more scent. it was as if he had gifted her the corpse-grown bramble blossom post-curation, else that it had been cultivated out of bone dust and fell magic; the fragrance withheld as though to beckon her to his side, where he kept its secret along with whatever else was hidden in the crags of his smile. she returned it to the fold. the colossal doors to the villa were almost open already, and their worn handles gave with an intelligence of pliance.

she was more nervous than the first time she had been asked to take from the public house to the stage, and manifold times more eager.

~~~

~~ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------\\\

~

“...You’ve made well on your promises, stranger.”

Solus was already awash, relishing the look of slow awe moving over her like some sorcery that coaxed statuary to life. An easy acquisition, part of him wanted to say, a gloat to hold over her captivated silence. The rest of him violently objected to the basic premise of interrupting this evolution. Vagabond to virtuoso. Statue to flesh.

Sorrow to whatever she would become once impaled upon the force of the keys.

The instrument was nothing to strut to one’s neighbours about, and certainly not one’s enemies; nor would it have befitted the average pupil. And though he loved the transmutational power of education, this construct was fitted specifically for the grip and touch of an artist.

It so sweetened the wonder that took over her, suddenly innocent again in her approach, as though her lightest touch would turn the spectre of the thing into dream dust, or else that it would break beneath her, reject her like it would reject the oafish weight of hands that would fail to appreciate its craft and destined purpose.

“I confess I retained no expectation that you would accept,” he affected in his most cosmopolitan tone. “The honour is mine, prodigal performer.”

“With all the respect you ought be afforded, I did not come here for conversation,” she said bluntly, tempered with the slightest indication that she did not wish for him to leave her. All the more curious.

“Ah, but that is only natural. I could hardly be offended by this gentlest request,” he corrected himself. A little more amusement slipped drop by drop into his voice, against what he suspected was his better judgment. Yet--what could she do? A thrill of gruesome curiosity swept him off his guard, that were she only to remember just a little more, just a phrase of the song that fell apart behind her one too-bright night, the ivory keys, the flooring, her dun travel trappings--and his _perfect_ , fitted white gloves--might all run deep crimson, the heat of the moment staining her handiwork forever.

To him it would be only a setback. His advantage was a cruel one, and so for the sake of her performance he retracted his weaponlike witticisms for the moment. They did not amuse her, and now that she made in her wonderment to take a seat before the keyboard, he held breaths he did not need to take just to preserve the impossible seconds before him.

She started without warning.

There was nothing that could have prepared him for that wave of obliterating sound and energy. No trick of dark would have spared him. This was, after all, the water-bearer behind the Deluge, and down to his atomised core he felt her thunderous command of the colossal instrument’s pieces lick the lies from his bones.

He must have cried out, for too soon thereafter she stopped and left a silence worse than the flood, and he found his palm resting on the apex of his temple and forehead.

“...Should I have cautioned you?”

If there was annoyance in the remark, the searing still caustically laving through him left him none the wiser for it. “...Nay, I was merely--surprised, I suppose. You’ve chosen something new, even to start with?”

Her gaze darted to her hands. “Oh. Yes. I’m learning a new piece. I thought I should bring one when I leave this town for the next.”

No surprise there. No rest for the wronged; but there was a streak of showmanship in the statement as well. Was there a new font of strength in her--one that stood against the storm, survived the flood, and persisted as strange and as loud and as threatening as all her might had before? The thought was tormentous, but he supped on it lasciviously, knowing full well that if this was the channel in which her deadly strength had survived, he would not-- _could_ not, for anything in his nature--do a single thing to stop her.

He straightened, nodding sagely in her direction, sweeping his palm over his forehead and resettling the wavy part in his hair.

“Please,” he offered.

“Continue.”

A blank look of quiet regard met him from over her shoulder. Surely enough, eventually, that face returned to the sea of pedals below it, and she rose to the first phrase of the piece, gentler this time.

An evil thing, the way that tenderness only drove the knife-tip sorrows of the notes deeper into his shadowless hide.  Keys of white auracite, they seemed, and if they were, their calling laid his unlife bare and forfeit. The Ascian felt his breathing flicker, hastened on a faint gasp.

Outside, through the large bay window, the daylight began to sink into the horizon, the blood glow welling up on thresholds soon to be crossed. Sorrow and irony flowed from the pianist’s fingertips as if to narrate the event—a cresting wave of notes that underscored the grotesquery of dusk.

Could this be the sound of a piece unpracticed truly? It just didn’t seem possible. She existed inside it. It left her as a breath would; a word, a hiss, a whisper. A scream.

Then, quite suddenly, the trance was broken. A twist of the little bones that joined her wrist to the fluted willow-stalks of her fingers, and a cluster of keys belched under the crush as she instinctively relinquished her grip.

A radiant snarl burst over her features, carrying with it the grunt of ire and physical pain; and, worse still, of the broken harmonization of sound. The instrument groaned for so many ticking seconds; a taunting dissonance.

 _Like the private chambers of her mind, no doubt._ The corner of his mouth twitched upwards in ludicrous amusement. _Art imitating the artist._ He suppressed a croak of a laugh and circled round to the side of the keyboard, his face craned vulturously down to examine her.

“I told you,” she said, gentler than he expected, though stiff with irritation and sore at her incident. “I have not finished learning this one.”

“And my word is as it was. I shall depart, if an audience impedes you.”

She straightened, pulling her hair back with her hands and sweeping through it the way one does before tying it back, then let it settle onto her back.

“No. I want you to stay.”

She reached for the keys without explaining. Solus deigned to press the matter; her responsivity, its transformation of the real into the abstraction of sound, was revelatory.

“Oh? And how comes this to be, my _protégé_?”

Her palms spread as she struck again at the chord that had at first blown him back like the pressure wall of a bombing. “I can’t describe it well in words. It’s here, in the piece. You are… strange.”

A flutter of little more than her nails performed the trills that followed. “And you are strange because I feel absurdly as though you anchor me to this world—for as long as you are here, with my playing.” An unspoken _Who are you?_ , he deduced.

Anxiety flooded the passages that came next, beautiful liquid cascades of _déjà vu_ , and this time no strain of the body tore her from them. Tensile strength built in the undertow of the clamour.

He was finding himself washed away with it, lifting his hand to his temple; shielding his third eye as the other two closed, losing his vision to the shiver of his lashes.

The sea of poison had washed some of her away as well. The land here, once-broiled in it, and she herself as one who had not sucked in her own death in it, existed in suspension, a post-war fugue. She had forgotten all of it, or enough of it not to piece together who and what either of them were.

But this towering sound, an ascendancy of cathedral steps to the gas-blackened sky, throttling the strings that held her whole instrument together; it had not. Music did not forget.

Could not.

And just as quickly, too quickly, the silence returned, and she hung over it, arms extended and her head bowed lightly.

“No. _No_ , damn it. That isn’t how it sounds!”

She seemed about to strike the lid of the grand piano in anger, but instead slumped with a despondent mutter.

He encountered no resistance upon laying his palm on her shoulder, standing halfway behind her.

“Ah, then you know how it _does_ sound. …Perhaps another try is in order.” He felt, more than saw, her nod. The hand slipped from her shoulder and she shuddered; one of his brows reflexively flicked upward.

The next _recitative_ was hastier, rushing briskly through passages that were formerly trod upon on tiptoe. He had taken to folding his arms, thumbing at his chin contemplatively.

“Again?”

His prodigy, his enemy, his _muse_ , nodded slowly, conforming without rejection into his posture as he closed the distance between them. Solus laid a hand on the back of her seat, and braced himself.

If this were only a _pinchful_ of the power that survived her battle in the Dark, he could only draw unsteady breaths of anticipation at what the final mastery of this bone-shaking suite would do.

She paused to return to a measure that demanded the cruelty her earlier wrath had inflicted, and, ever wont to taste from the fire, he leaned down to her ear, the swing of his earring drumming briefly against her face.

“…Again.” At almost a whisper, his voice cracked hoarse and deep. The waves of notes began again to storm, and his black heart to race.

Outside, violet darkness spilled over the skyline, eclipsing the throes of crimson sunlight in the far distance. A black gloaming was setting into the room, making shaded statuary of them both.

Fury here, a feathered finger there, and he could feel the fatigue begin to crawl through her muscles. The poor thing, she had been playing for hours.

Fortunately, for her, time was going slack with decay.

Ah.

And now they were arrived once more at the great steps of the final crescendo. He wondered if she would have it this time, if the twisting ascent up those great cathedral stairs would accept her touch without contrition at last.

He made no attempt to stymy the silent groan of approval that rose from the depths of him as the low register of the instrument called deep and loud into the twilight.

No hesitation.

No second guessing.

No hiccup or stutter or crawl in the dizzying scaling of the spire of sound.

The sea was boiling.

True night was falling.

And he stood behind her, his head falling back in ecstasy. The one who stood alone against the storm—and took him out with it.

He felt her ribs heave as the last gasps of sound struck the polished surface.

Solus had not noticed the rise and fall of his own gasps, and became aware that his black forelock was clinging to his brow under a mist of heat.

He caught her at the wrists, precariously, as she fell with a muted thud against his raiment. The strings buried in the heart of the instrument still keened from her touches; through the haze of his rapture he raised her to seating, supporting her spent weight.

As she rolled her shoulders once more and straightened her posture, his hands folded and slid down her wrists to rest at the roots of her knuckles. The shade caught his breath and craned his face toward her ear.

 

"... _Again. Play it again_."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> ... *nervous tea-sipping*


End file.
